COMMENT: Labour Drowning Not Swimming

1.04.00pm GMT Thu 3rd Jan 2008

What a way to start a New Year. Labour run Lambeth limps from one crisis to another and it's Leader's rantings seem to get wilder and wilder as the weeks go by - and the Promised Land looks no nearer than when they set off nearly two years ago.

The trouble is, the electorate was promised a Flagship Borough but Labour's calamitous captain is looking increasingly like the pilot of the Titanic. Icebergs? What Icebergs? Half steam ahead!

Trouble is, as history tells us, there were simply not enough lifeboats on the Titanic to save everyone on board. So most of us will be condemned to swimming in rather choppy and icy waters any time soon..

Which is rather unfortunate because in Lambeth, Labour High Command has seemingly scuppered all the swimming pools.

Firstly, it thought it would be a jolly good idea to rebuild Stockwell Park school which had a swimming pool with one that didn't.

In the North of the Borough, Labour clumsily traded a much needed swimming pool against any affordable housing in a prestigious private skyscraper development on the riverbank right behind the National Theatre and so outraged everyone including the Secretary of State that she's called-in the planning permission for a public enquiry. So that's another swimming pool that's not going to get built any time soon.

Then rather than build a brand new state-of-the-art swimming pool and leisure centre in Brixton, as we suggested, they thought it better to pour taxpayer's money into the decrepit current swimming pool faster than the water was leaking out while closing it for months at a time.

Rumours suggest that this sticking plaster approach will lead to more and more closures of the leaky leisure centre once dubbed the Pride of Brixton. And, amid the chaos, in a typical money-grabbing Labour double-whammy they have had the monumental cheek to whack-up all the charges.

Meanwhile the Streatham Hub Project - another state-of-the-art swimming pool and ice arena masterminded originally by the forward-thinking Lib Dems - is creeping along with all the exuberance of the slowest glacier.

Two years on and Labour has only just got round to agreeing the Planning Gain document with the developers - and now, after a nine month moratorium, they actually want another six months to decide whether to pull out of the deal or not. Lambeth's leadership makes Gordon Brown look decisive.

And what of Future Clapham? Shrouded in a dense fog over Christmas and the way ahead not at all clear as to whether Labour can keep its fundamental Election Promise to keep Clapham Swimming Pool open.

So there we have it. As Londoners limber-up for the Olympics and the world watches, here in Lambeth, we could face a future with all our swimming pools either closed, leaking or not built.

And that takes vision. According to Labour.